China tightens Web screws after Xinjiang riot

By Ben Blanchard

SHANGHAI (Reuters) - China clamped down on the Internet in the capital of China's northwestern region of Xinjiang on Monday, in the hope of stemming the flow of information about ethnic unrest which left 140 people dead.

The government has blamed Sunday's riots in Urumqi -- the deadliest unrest since the 1989 military crackdown on the Tiananmen pro-democracy demonstrations -- on exiled Muslim separatists.

Some residents in Urumqi, Xinjiang's regional capital, said they had been told there would be no Internet access for 48 hours.

"Since yesterday evening I haven't been able to get online," store owner Han Zhenyu told Reuters by telephone.

"No Internet here. Friends said they cannot log on, either," said a mobile phone seller who gave only his surname, Zhang.

The websites of the Urumqi city and Xinjiang regional governments were also down.

But the government appears to have thrown the net even wider, with users in capital Beijing and financial hub Shanghai complaining social networking site Twitter has also been blocked.

Fanfou.com, a domestic competitor of Twitter, was still accessible, though searches for key words such as "Urumqi," "Xinjiang" and "Uighur" gave no results.